Advergaming Scenario: If PepsiCo Were to Change the Game!

Given all the theory I have been spouting these past few weeks it’s only fair that I man up and provide an illustration of how Strategic Advergaming may work for a brand.

So what better brand to take up for illustration than PepsiCo – who are all about changing the game!

I call my concept SOMOGAN = Social Media Online Gaming Network – a network of social RPGs (That’s Role Playing Games for the philistines amongst you!), independent yet interlinked in gameplay, each mapped to a leading PepsiCo brand.

The gaming platform – Facebook. It’s where the TG is, it’s got all the viral tools of spreading a social game.

 

The graphic below illustrates how the SOMOGAN would be a portal for players to enter, choose which particular game they would want to play and then see them leverage their friends – real life or game-specific – across the other games to level up and meet the game goals.

 

 
Each brand game would be independent and complete in itself. Two examples:

• The Mountain/(Mtn Dew) RPG could be in the action/adventure RPG genre with elements of a Point Break –surfer-dudes-who-flirt-with-danger (minus the crime) kind of  setting and narrative.
• The Cheetos RPG could have Chester going Calvin and Hobbes in a “Spaceman Spiff” like setting for a fantasy-rich experience or take an edgier subversive “Clerks meets Police Academy” tone in line with the Orange Underground campaign

Level complexity follows a geometric progression, making it critical after a certain level to have powerful friends in the larger SOMOGAN universe!

That last part is really important because that is the real game from a marketer’s perspective. Uniting users with different tastes, preferences, and lifestyles.

 While each is playing a game of their own these people are collaborating across the network and sharing a common umbrella.

The graphic below illustrates how this network effect would build up.

 

Benefits to Brand PepsiCo

By potentially creating a large digital community PepsiCo could use this audience for a variety of strategic and tactical brand activation programs.

However, the real value of having such a powerful property is the benefit to the corporate brand which goes beyond the undoubted benefits that will obtain to individual brands.

The SOMOGAN moves beyond speaking about individual brands to the consumers and gets into a wholly different space of integrating with the digital lifestyles of PepsiCo consumers by meeting their needs for high quality engaging and interactive content. From Brand Equity to Brand Love.

Hey if P&G could do this with a movie, why can’t someone do this with a game. Free your mind!

So what do you think? Do you buy the premise I outlined? Where do you see the pitfalls? Would you see yourself playing such a game? Comments are open!

 Next week, it’s some advergaming examples that I have been very impressed by, and the takeaways one could take from them!

Comments

[Tony Giallourakis]

Very interesting. I linked this blog on our Advergames.com Advergames In The News section.